High hopes on Marcos Jnr

Manila – Despite his Oxford education and jet-set lifestyle, the Philippines’s president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Junior sailed to victory this week as a champion of the poor. Now they expect him to deliver.

Residents of the impoverished Baseco neighbourhood in Manila do not think of 64-year-old Marcos, nicknamed Bongbong, as the mega-rich scion of a political dynasty famed for extorting billions, stockpiling designer shoes and treating public coffers like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

In this thick lattice of roads, lanes and alleyways jam-packed with street kids, push trikes and hawkers, Marcos means hope. “A lot of change will happen when he becomes president,” 30-yearold JR Foras said, as he waited for customers in a stuffy barbershop.

He predicted that by the end of Marcos Jnr’s six-year term “there will be a lot of jobs”.

Like many young Filipinos, Foras has bought into the misinformation that has reinvented the Marcos family image. For believers, Marcos Snr’s bloody decades-long rule has been transformed into a gilded age, making Bongbong the obvious choice to restore those imagined glories.

“I voted for him because of what his father accomplished. We were number one in Asia. I just feel like he would do it again,” said Foras. –